The Trans-formation Of Women’s Sports

High school girls in Alaska are crying foul after a male sprinter took home all-state honors in girls’ track and field. According to local reports, it was the first time in Alaskan history that a male athlete competed in the girls’ state championships.

Haines senior Nattaphon Wangyot–who self-identifies as a girl–advanced to the state finals in the 100-meter and 200-meter events. He won fifth place in the 100-meter dash and third place in the 200-meter. In both events, he competed against girls as young as ninth grade

Wangyot, a Thai native who was born male and identifies as female, qualified and competed in the Class 3A girls’ sprints at the state meet, capturing third place in the 200-meter dash (27.3) and fifth in the 100 (13.36). She also played for the girls volleyball and basketball teams at Haines during her senior year.

However, Fairbanks (Alaska) Hutchinson junior Saskia Harrison, whose time of 14.11 seconds in the 100 left her outside the 16-competitor cut for the Class 1A-2A-3A field, took issue with Wangyot’s presence in the event.

“I’m glad that this person is comfortable with who they are and they’re able to be happy with who they are,” she told KTVA-TV, “but competitively I don’t think it’s completely 100 percent fair.”

Of course it’s unfair to female athletes. But this is the new world, in which we all have to pretend that a biological male whose body has been shaped by male hormones is not physically stronger than females. This is the insane result of believing that we can overcome biology by force of imagination. In this case, it has a real-world effect on young women competing against this MtF transgender.ICYMI, the Olympics are on board the trans train too:

Transgender athletes should be allowed to compete in the Olympics and other international events without undergoing sex reassignment surgery, according to new guidelines adopted by the IOC.

International Olympic Committee medical officials said on Sunday they changed the policy to adapt to current scientific, social and legal attitudes on transgender issues.

The guidelines are designed as recommendations – not rules or regulations – for international sports federations and other bodies to follow and should apply for this year’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

“I don’t think many federations have rules on defining eligibility of transgender individuals,” IOC medical director Dr Richard Budgett said. “This should give them the confidence and stimulus to put these rules in place.”

Under the previous IOC guidelines, approved in 2003, athletes who transitioned from male to female or vice versa were required to have reassignment surgery followed by at least two years of hormone therapy in order to be eligible to compete.

Now, surgery will no longer be required, with female-to-male transgender athletes eligible to take part in men’s competitions “without restriction”.

Meanwhile, male-to-female transgender athletes will need to demonstrate that their testosterone level has been below a certain cutoff point for at least one year before their first competition.

The first time a male-to-female transgender wins an Olympic medal, we will see protests, probably.

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93 Responses to The Trans-formation Of Women’s Sports

I have to wonder about the pushing of the Trans agenda as of late. It is my belief that if you go digging around you’ll find some rich Democrat party donors who care about this issue. Similarly, Bill Clinton was the first politician to solicit gay donors, and since then the gay rights agenda has won over the traditionalists. Follow the money and you can probably find a handful of individuals who are pushing it.

Her results prior to and after her treatment have been different. Alas, she was ridiculed and hated for winning her gold medal even though it was her unusual biology and not her self-identification that was a problem.

By the way, the school district policy that allowed Wangyot to race as a girl is also bigoted bigotry made by bigots. According to their policy:

“”For the purposes of gender identification for interscholastic activities, the district will consider the gender identity based on the student’s consistent declaration of gender identity, their actions, attitude, dress and mannerisms.””

Oh really? How does a girl dress? What are female mannerisms? Consistent declaration? What about the gender fluid?

This cannot stand. That poor Wangyot kid is just like Rosa Parks. Bigots!

But don’t worry. The Obama administration’s letter will take care of that BS.

“Likewise, a school may not discipline students or exclude them from participating in activities for appearing or behaving in a manner that is consistent with their gender identity or that does not conform to stereotypical notions of masculinity or femininity.”

So get this. That school that let a person with a penis participate as a girl at track and field and earn all-state status? It’s hopelessly bigoted by Obama administration standards. And its bigoted bigotry could land it in federal court.

Someone with even the most amateurish knowledge of physiology understands that there are many important factors besides hormone levels that can drastically affect performance: height, center of mass, skeletal ratios (ie, relative size of hands/feet, etc), heart/lung capacities, much more. There is a reason why competitive male swimmers tend to be tall and long limbed and female gymnasts narrow-hipped and flat-chested for instance, traits that no surgery or other kind of intervention can create. And while the science is far from settled, there has as well long been quite reasonable speculation that there may be small but very consequential sex differentiations in certain cognitive abilities related to physicality as well, such as superior spatial acuity (men) or organization/planning (women) that are of immense consequence to sports performance.

Human sexual dimorphism is limited but very powerful such that outside a population distribution of comparable physiology so small as to be near-insignificant statistically, there is no amount of body modification of any kind that will permit a woman to meaningfully compete in virtually any competition of extreme physical prowess with a man of similar age and training. The IOC and other sports organizations have, likely through an admirable impulse to fairness and restraint, maintained a low bar of restrictions regarding trans athletes because the leaders and competitors have not yet been fully confronted with the consequences of doing so. As incidences such as the one described here increase, these policies will necessarily be revisited and it will absolutely not go the trans activits’ way because it cannot.

This to me is one more example of the astonishingly self-destructive tactics of the transgender movement in often constructing the main body of their arguments about empirical claims against science and impact – specifically regarding women, the very constituency many seek to join – that are or may well prove to be utterly falsifiable, something that the gay rights movement to their credit and great success largely avoided. I realize Mr. Dreher would disagree with that last somewhat at least (likely beginning with what even constitutes “impirical”) but my point is really about strategy. I say as, like Robert above, a gay person with some knowledge of activism very much inclined to support transgender rights in every way: the activist transgender leadership is massively betraying its own cause and community with these kinds of dangerously testable assertions and their movement is now in great danger of imploding as a result just as the window for success is finally opening.

“We’re still speaking of less than 0.5 % of the population, most of whom are not athletes.”

They don’t need to be very good “athletes” in order to completely deform girls’ sports. For example, this kid’s 13.36-second time in the 100 M is about 2.5 seconds slower than the winning time among boys in Alaska:

So this kid might not even be on the team if he were competing with boys. I don’t think too many straight boys are going to pretend to be girls in order to compete (although it could happen), but you can’t say that this isn’t totally distorting the field for real girls.

I don’t see why the only problem is with “unscrupulous” boys competing against girls. Even with testosterone suppression, it seems highly likely that transgender females will have an advantage in sports over non-transgender females. There are just too many features of male biology to all be suppressed with a few exogenous hormone changes, and moreso for those transgender women who went through puberty as males (as opposed to current transgender kids who will likely experience puberty in their desired gender).

I understand that the current conventional wisdom is that transgender women do not have a competitive advantage over non-transgender women. But since most of the people espousing that theory and even doing the research seem to be trans-advocates, I’m not really convinced of it. In any case, how long have transwomen been competing in athletics as women? Are there even enough statistics to make that determination? Someone said above that there are over 300 female athletes for every transgender female athlete. I wonder if one could figure out how often you would expect the transgender competitors to medal if they truly did not have a competitive advantage from their male genetics.

I remember Tamikka Brents suffering an orbital fracture after fighting Fallon Fox and the discussion among women fighters about whether it was safe for them to fight people who had higher bone density, masculine hip structure, etc. It is quite sad to watch this discussion play out really.

I wouldn’t count on that. The countries that have embraced transgenderism have a lot more wealth and power than the ones that haven’t. If countries like Botswana or Uruguay protest men competing in women’s events it will be pointed to as proof of their backwardness.

Russia is a developed and powerful country, with a storied Olympic history, and takes a dim view of transgenderism at best. China will at current growth rates have the biggest economy in the world by 2025, and I doubt they’re especially fond of transgenderism either.

Robert –
The feminists I have contact with are aghast at the trans business. They see men and women as biologically male and female; physically quite different. This is not working for them as it puts them physically at risk. They would probably agree with Mr Hate Crime that people are playing make believe with their biological sex.

I’ve been thinking about these sorts of issue for a long time now, because they’ve been front and center for the Olympics and international track and field for years.

They have been trying, and failing, to come up with consistent physical standards for who’s a man and who’s a woman. It predates the current transgender debate and it’s not a failure of imagination or logic – biological reality simply offers few binary answers. The smartest doctors and scientists in the world, paid well to do so, have not been able to agree on who is female and who is male.

So, to me, the real underlying question isn’t how we should change (or not change) our principles to save athletics as we currently know it, but how to change athletics to bring it more into line with our principles. Our principles, in theory, ought to be more important than our sports.

Sounds extreme? Like we’ll eventually abolish most gender separation in sports? These things happen organically with time. Letting women vote was extreme at one time. Showing an ankle in public was too, while owning another human being wasn’t. We evolve and everything changes. There is no eternal order, only the temporary orders we manage to overlay on our chaotic present.

Before we even fully adapt to this newer reality, however, we’ll have deal more and more with the tricky definition of a “natural” human being for athletic purposes. Pistorious and Tommy John Surgery and Meldonium are early examples, and you’d have to be daft not to see that more and more effective examples are on the way. Eventually, we’ll have to figure out how to draw the line between natural competitors and enhanced ones. And, just like with the gender debate, we will struggle and kick and scream and fight about where to draw the lines and, more to the point, who ends up on which sides of the line.

You can’t stop the evolution of society and, by and large, you can’t make it go backwards. Few can do much to affect it, and those who do are rarely the ones that set out to do so.

My wife brought it home. She’s an educational assistant at a middle school in a liberal town and they just don’t know what to make of it; they just know that at some point the lawsuits will start piling up.

Scenario: girls will refuse to occupy a locker room with someone obviously male. In so doing they will not comply with the “dress down” requirement for physical activity which would affect their grade; possibly even resulting in failure.

As the liked article points out: this has not been thought through. At all.

“We evolve and everything changes. There is no eternal order, only the temporary orders we manage to overlay on our chaotic present.”

Well, there is actually an order. That order is evolution, through which, over millions of years, various changes are “tested” and the most effective ones “chosen” via natural selection. Childbearing has co-evolved with certain physical and mental traits in humans, including a smaller size and less aggressiveness in females. Until humans cease childbearing these traits are likely to be “needed.”

Now, we can certainly use technology to attempt to outwit evolution. Maybe in the future we’ll develop artificial uterii so that existing humans don’t have to endure the physical burdens of childbearing. Then, men and women can truly be equal and we can escape this unpleasant evolutionary stricture whereby women are smaller and weaker than men and cannot compete successfully against men unless we have our own segregated competitions. But, what will we lose if we do that? Probably something. It’s hard to outwit evolution, and when you think you’re outwitting it, you may be laying the seeds of your own species’ destruction.

I don’t give a fig about the morality or lack thereof of a sex-change operation. As someone above suggests, citing Renee Richards,it’s not even newsworthy. But aesthetically I find your choice of picture of Jenner revolting. (I’ve never actually focused on one before.) Is that a fair example or are you trying to make him/her look pathetic?

[NFR: It’s what comes up when you type “Caitlyn Jenner” into Shutterstock. — RD]

” The smartest doctors and scientists in the world, paid well to do so, have not been able to agree on who is female and who is male.”

Well, there’s so much politics around this that it is no surprise. Certainly the sexual dimorphism of men and women involves a small level of overlap in some of the dimporphic areas, but clearly if you looked at the statistics there would be two clear peaks for most criteria: height, strength, genital morphology, chromosome makeup, internal reproductive organs, etc. And almost all of the time, they would correlate together into two groups. That is, those with male genitals would normally ALSO have XY chromosomes and ALSO testes on the inside and so on. Sexual dimorphism isn’t just some wierd myth. It’s a biological reality (it feels like I”m in the twilight zone having to argue this). A few people will literally be in the middle somewhere by one criterion or other, where their genitals might be ambiguous or something. Caster Semenya would presumably be an example.

But does that relate, exactly, to the issue of how transgender people will be accommodated in the sports world? Caster Semenya came by her high testosterone naturally. It was literally the makeup of her body. Why should she be penalised for the way her natural body is built? Now, transgender is different because you are born with a certain body and then you change it with hormone blockers or other hormones. Thus you end up being competitively advantaged because now you get to enter a new, easier competitive class. Certainly your treatment might be medically necessary. But, a person with ADHD might have to take Adderall for their medically necessary treatment, and as far as I understand it, that still excludes them from competition because it’s an exogenous advantage.

For me it boils down to the same thing: transgender people need some level of accommodations and society should provide some accommodations. But these accommodations cannot be to the level of completeness that they would like, because the basic reason society has divvied up some resources to be specifically for women, is that women suffer certain risks and effects as a result of having bodies that are adapted to bearing children. Any redistribution of accommodations away from the class of people who bear children, is really a statement by society that those who bear children are a lower form of being who don’t deserve support from society for the asymmetric burden we bear. The fact that those who bear children also usually have breasts, long hair, round faces, and weaker muscle tone, is ancillary, not central, to the problems women suffer in society.

RichardB: “You can’t stop the evolution of society and, by and large, you can’t make it go backwards. Few can do much to affect it, and those who do are rarely the ones that set out to do so.”

So am I reading your comment correctly? The end of gender-segregated sports is progress, and where evolution is taking us?

You do realize the end of gendered sports is the end of women in sports, right? Or the end of women as serious competitors in any sport, which is not much different, given the essential nature of sport as competition.

Now I don’t care a whole lot about sports in general, or women’s sports in particular, but even I find it a bit odd to see driving women out of the world of sports as forward-thinking.

It is not the case that no one has ever noticed that people with male hormones have more muscle mass than people who don’t. There is actually a discussion among trans advocates and athletic organizations about how to address these issues which you can read about if you care to do it.

So far none of the ones I know are, most of them are pretty enthusiastic about it.

Would be interested if there’s age clustering. The only two aghast feminists that I personally know are elder ladies. The younger coworker-crowd is a mix of enthusiastic and “haven’t thought about it much” and “think this wasn’t thought through properly”, but no one aghast.

Russia is a developed and powerful country, with a storied Olympic history, and takes a dim view of transgenderism at best.

However one feels about TG athletes, given Russia’s history of depending on chemical enhancements for their medals, they are the *last* country that should be complaining about who can and can’t compete.

Better living through chemistry. I can therefore assume she’s on board the Trans Train as well. Applause, applause. Brave girls to buy fake boobs and fill your body with hormones to nurse your babies. Brave girls for having the courage to compete in your man body against all those girls. Brave girls for using the courts to force your way into the locker rooms in high schools. Sheesh. The cognitive disconnect is crazy-making.

I don’t give a fig about the morality or lack thereof of a sex-change operation. As someone above suggests, citing Renee Richards,it’s not even newsworthy. But aesthetically I find your choice of picture of Jenner revolting. (I’ve never actually focused on one before.) Is that a fair example or are you trying to make him/her look pathetic?

That is one of the better shots I’ve seen of Jenner, not that I go out of my way to look at pictures of him. Any random photo of Jenner will look worse than that. The glamour shots, such as the one for the cover of Vanity Fair, are air-brushed and photoshopped to the max, and they are not what he looks like.

Maybe this will be a reality check for everyone? When male-to-female transsexuals start winning women’s events, the actual physical differences between the sexes will be hard to ignore. The fantasized fight scenes of stick-thin actresses beating up men twice their size will be seen as the fiction they actually are.

Darth and Viking: Yes, my contacts are in their 60s and 70s. Apparently the kids are a different story. Younger ones seem to regard gender as ideological, not biological. I think they have their heads up their ideology.

“Women P12 podium for the Johnson City Omnium Sunday Criterium. It was a difficult race on a slippery, technical course in the rain. There were many crashes. I went down, slipping on one of the many painted crosswalks on the first lap. Torn bibs and jersey…and bleeding. But I took my free lap and got back in. I made a couple attempts to create a breakaway, but there was a lot of power in the field. The Finish Strong girls controlled the front on the penultimate lap. I attacked on the last lap, strung it out, and won in the sprint. “

Exactly. And we’ll discover, after years and years of high child mortality rates, and millions of dollars of research into the causes, that human beings need to have some skin in the game in order to be invested in the extremely hard work of caring for infants and young children.

If our species didn’t need women, we wouldn’t have evolved them. If we didn’t need men, we wouldn’t have evolved them either.

“Man” and “woman” are little more than social constructs (except when the health of “women” is at stake–and then it’s biological, of course).

Definitely.

New clinical trial guidelines are mandating a balanced representation of both sexes, and rightly so, since men and women are different.

It may be interesting to observe that one of the reasons women have been historically underrepresented or excluded from trials is that one of the differences between men and women is that women have a more developed self-preservation instinct, and are therefore much more difficult to recruit for trials.

More likely what will happen is that research on women’s health will slow down while researchers try to figure out how to include transwomen. I don’t think it’s at all clear how to do this. If they are taking estrogen/progesterone, then they should be researched as women? But since they don’t menstruate, are they representative of women? (who suffer blood loss, sometimes become anemic, get ovarian cancer, uterine fibroids, and so on). If they are included in clinical studies of female biology, will we get an answer that accurately represents non-trans women? Will their inclusion as women skew the results?

“There is actually a discussion among trans advocates and athletic organizations about how to address these issues which you can read about if you care to do it.”

Who in the world would care to? The Obama administration has spoken. The standard is whatever the athlete says. Whenever the athlete says it. Anyone superintendent who makes a different policy is a nasty bigot bound for federal court.

You really see that as an open invitation to careful consideration?

The only way this gets dialed back is if SJW feminists take on the SJW trams crowd. The rest of us are observers and potential defendants.